Page 24 of A Forever Kind of Rancher

She was content with her fantasy life when he was away, and she didn’t mind being by herself.

And none of those things were signs in and of themselves that she didn’t love her husband. It was only that she could be a little bit more honest in this moment than she’d been able to in those first couple of days. She wasn’t heartbroken. She had felt deeply wounded by the fact that she had lost her life. That she had lost these things she cared about so deeply. That her life had been compromised and shaken.

That she was thrown back into the space where she didn’t know how she was going to survive. And she had never wanted her daughters to experience that.

She had never wanted them to feel any instability, and she was the most upset about that. And being betrayed. That had been a knife wound straight to her chest. That had been unconscionable. She really and truly hated it. She didn’t like that she had been lying next to a man, making love to a man, telling a man she loved him, while he was able to take those hands, that mouth, that body and make love to another woman.

She would never have cheated on him. Not ever. She would’ve coasted along in this marriage that functioned primarily because...

Even though she had never betrayed him, she was in many ways functioning as a single woman when he was gone. And she had a feeling that was part of why their marriage had worked as well as it had.

He pretended she didn’t exist when he was away, and she sort of did the same to him.

That didn’t make her feel guilty, it just made her recognize that some fundamental things were missing from her marriage. And maybe that was why Boone had loomed so large in her fantasies.

She had done her best—her very best—to never fantasize about Boone.

She was attracted to him. But she didn’t lie in bed when Daniel was away and think about Boone intentionally when she lay there and put her hands on her own body while imagining they were his.

Now sometimes he popped into her head, and she replaced him with Captain America because it was totally fine to fantasize about a man you weren’t married to, but he really should be a man you also didn’t know in real life. At least, that had been her arbitrary set of rules.

Every woman needed an arbitrary set of rules.

She did not need to follow those rules now.

Daniel had rendered them void.

That made her feel hot. She shifted, and she put Boone’s socks down a little bit too quickly. Yes, she could fantasize about Boone now if she wanted to.

She didn’t love her husband.

Suddenly, she felt dizzy. She didn’t know if she was elated or if she was crushed by that realization. But she had been living a life she hadn’t intended to find herself in. Daniel’s betrayal was not the biggest issue with her marriage.

The problem was, they had met and they had fallen in love quickly. And Wendy had always been guarded. But he had gotten through her defenses with his charm. She hadn’t been one for casual sex. She’d been waiting, and not because of any great moral reason, but because she was afraid.

He had gotten past all of that, and when he had asked her to marry him two months into their affair, she’d said yes. She didn’t have anything else. Her mother had passed away the previous year, and she’d just felt so alone. So being with someone... To make a family, she had loved that.

And she had to wonder how much of it had always been loving that. Loving that she had someone. Someone she was attracted to, someone she genuinely liked—most of the time—but perhaps someone she had never actually been head over heels in love with.

She didn’t want him back. She wanted the stability back. She wanted to be comfortable. But...

But if she were being perfectly honest with herself, she was thinking about more than comfort. That moment with Boone in the kitchen last night had been so electrically charged. And the way he had responded to it was... It was unlike anything else she had ever experienced.

Because he had been watching her. And more than that, he had seen her. He had responded to the way she had stiffened up, the way she had resisted.

And it was only because she knew if he had gotten any closer she would’ve kissed him. And more than that, she knew the minute she and Boone touched it was never going to stop at a simple meeting of mouths. Their clothes would be off instantly, and...

That terrified her. Because she was trying to start over, and she was trying to find something new. Because once she had imagined herself in love with a man because she had been at a crossroads in her life, because she had been afraid and insecure. Because she had thought it would be preferable to grab hold of the first man she slept with rather than be by herself.

And she didn’t want to go from one relationship straight into another.

It doesn’t have to be a relationship...

Now she really was being an idiot. She had to stop thinking about that. She had to.

She picked the socks back up and started folding again, and then she heard a sound downstairs. She stood up from the bed, the socks still clutched in her hand, and went down the hall, looking over the rail of the staircase down to the front door below.

Boone was in the doorway. He looked up at her, a cowboy hat placed firmly on his head. And right now, at this point in her life, the sight of a cowboy certainly shouldn’t make her tremble.

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